Goodfortheworld.com

Things had been running surprisingly smoothly on the “Right to Be Forgotten Google Listening Tour” until Paul Nemitz set foot on the stage in Brussels, its last stop, on Nov. 4.

Stung by a European Court of Justice ruling in May that required the search engine to remove, if requested, links to pages containing private information, Google wanted to show the European public that it was not deaf to its very European concerns over privacy. Between September and November, the American Internet giant organized public hearings in seven European Union capitals, where local experts were invited to give their opinion on how the European Court ruling could best be implemented. An independent advisory council (of which I am a member) questioned the experts and will produce a report on the conclusions reached.

Given the level of resentment against Google in Europe, I was impressed by the experts’ determination to deal with the issues at stake in depth rather than with the easier political dimension of the debate. With the most vocal critics of Google having generally turned down the invitation to speak, the whole exercise, led by savvy Google officials, was almost disappointingly civilized.

Paul Nemitz, who is German but, more importantly, the director for fundamental rights in the European Commission’s justice department, had accepted the invitation. He did not mind speaking at the Brussels gathering. He did not mind complimenting Google for, as he put it, “taking the lobbying activity public.” And he did not mind asking Google to address the “key challenge to freedom of speech in societies.” The challenge, Mr. Nemitz pointed out, does not come from the European Court of Justice but from “mass surveillance.” And that, he added, is what the United States National Security Agency is doing.

Finally, the elephant in the room was named. Google may have a lot of travails in Europe, from taxes (not enough) to antitrust investigations (too many), but the clash on data protection, which the right to be forgotten epitomizes, has been given new life by Edward Snowden’s revelations of global electronic surveillance programs run by the National Security Agency.

So even though, or because, we can’t live without it — since it commands about 90 percent of the market in the European Union, compared with about 67 percent of the American market — Google is our favorite villain. The Wall Street Journal calls it “Europe’s Piñata.” Mathias Döpfner, C.E.O. of Axel Springer, the powerful German media company, claims he is “afraid” of this “digital superstate.” Arnaud Montebourg, when he was still France’s economy minister, said that he saw a colonialist bent to the American Internet giants’ unfettered power in Europe and felt that it was a threat to our sovereignty.

The backlash has hit all members of the GAFA gang (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon), but it’s Google that is taking most of the heat: for being too huge, too dominant, too arrogant and too opaque. Late last month, the European Parliament passed a nonbinding resolution asking for its breakup.

This rift is more serious than the Microsoft battle a decade ago. It has exposed deep trans-Atlantic differences that should not be dismissed as mere European angst, jealousy or conservatism. The fact that the United States Federal Trade Commission has not found grounds for legal action against Google doesn’t mean that there aren’t any grounds in the European Union: Europeans and Americans have different approaches to monopoly power. By the way, the complaints against Google in Brussels have also been brought by rival American companies like Microsoft, Yelp and TripAdvisor.

There are philosophical differences as well. Shortly after Mr. Snowden dropped his bombshell, in June 2013, President Obama visited Berlin. At a joint press conference, Chancellor Angela Merkel described the Internet as “new territory, uncharted territory to all of us,” stressing that “we talked at great length about the new possibilities” and also about “the new threats that the Internet opens up.”

“Threat” is a word rarely associated with the Internet in America, where a free web is seen as a tool for spreading liberty: The Internet is a force for good. While happy to use it, Europeans feel uneasy about such a powerful tool being left unregulated. For them, the force for good is the state which, through democratic institutions, is supposed to protect them from threats.

Another major difference, obviously, is privacy, which history has taught Europeans to cherish. Is it a coincidence that George Orwell was British, not American? As the debate on the right to be forgotten shows, the great philosophical battle of the Internet, freedom of speech versus privacy, is now underway. So far, Europeans and Americans dissent on how to balance these two fundamental rights. But the amount of de-referencing requests received by Google from European Union users (almost 180,000 since May), with the French and Germans as top requesters, shows that this issue cannot be treated lightly.

This is only the beginning. Take a closer look at what Google is working on these days, well beyond Gmail, Google Earth or Google+, and soon our byzantine arguments about whether de-referencing should apply to google.fr, to the 28 European domains, or globally to google.com will look trivial. We are now entering the age of Google Brain, Google X, Calico, biotechnologies and artificial intelligence, in which the Silicon Valley giant is making major investments. This is also uncharted territory. More ethical and philosophical questions will be raised, on which Google and Europeans will probably differ.

In a fascinating interview at the end of October with The Financial Times, Larry Page, Google’s co-founder, was asked whether a private company, rather than governments, should be throwing its weight behind some of the most ambitious science projects. “Well,” he retorted, “somebody’s got to do it.” With $62 billion in cash and equivalents, Google is certainly in a better position than many debt-ridden governments. “How do we use all these resources ... and have a much more positive impact on the world?” Mr. Page mused.

One is left to wonder how Google, beyond “do no evil,” will decide what is a “positive impact” for the rest of the world. Will it be the google.com way? In the rest of the world, we have google.fr, google.de, google.sg or google.co.in. There is no google.us: Americans use google.com. And google.com is also good for the rest of the world. But as we now see, it is not so easily one-size-fits-all. Nor goodfortheworld.com.